Saginaw Spirit coach Greg Gilbert named OHL Coach of the Year

View full sizeJeff Schrier | Mlive.comSaginaw Spirit Head Coach Greg Gilbert was named Ontario Hockey League Coach of the Year.

SAGINAW TWP. — The phone rang Monday morning, and Saginaw Spirit coach Greg Gilbert was surprised to hear Ontario Hockey League commissioner David Branch on the other end.

And he was even more surprised when Branch told him he had been voted the Matt Layden trophy winner as the OHL's coach of the year.

"I didn't know what to say, to be quite honest with you," Gilbert said. "I was awestruck."

Gilbert didn't step behind the Spirit bench until just over four months ago. Tuesday, he was announced as the league's top coach. He finished with 45 points, ahead of Kitchener's Steve Spott (39 points) and Brampton's Stan Butler (34 points), in voting by the league's coaches.

In Gilbert's 36 games on the bench, the Spirit went 20-10-1-5, after starting the year 11-17-0-2 under Todd Watson. The team also improved its goals scored from 3.4 per game to 4.3 per game, and cut down its goals against from 4.1 to 3.4.

After his hiring on Dec. 10, Gilbert took over a Spirit team loaded with talent after a 2011 division title, but one that had underachieved early in the season.

The biggest factor in leading it from ninth place to fifth and to the second round of the OHL playoffs, Gilbert says, was the players buying into a new way of doing things.

"It's huge, it's the whole thing to be quite honest with you," Gilbert said. "If you don't sell your players and get them believing in something, bad things happen and you have a splintered group that go in all different directions."

Gilbert is the first Spirit coach to be given the award. This is the second career second coach of the year award for the former Calgary Flames coach -- he won the AHL coach of the year award in 1997.

This one, though, caught him off guard. He didn't expect to win coach of the year in a league he had only coached 36 regular-season games in.

"I was very surprised, coming in for half a season and all the other coaches have been here the whole year," Gilbert said. "They've been in the fray a lot longer than I have been."

But while six teams remain active in the OHL playoffs, the Spirit were eliminated Saturday night with a Game 6 loss to the London Knights. So the next award Gilbert has his sights on: an OHL title.

"I just want to succeed," Gilbert said. "I personally want to succeed, as a player I wanted to succeed and I wanted to be a champion, and I want to do the same as a coach. I've come close a few tims, but no cigar."